1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to search engines and, specifically, to a way of deciding whether a web site is of interest to people in a particular country or interest group.
2. Description of Background Art
Conventional search engines allow a user to locate data such as web pages and images by entering keywords. Such conventional search engines are used widely in Internet searches, although they can be used to search any large collection of information.
It is well-known that people in different countries and geographical locations are interested in different sub-sets of information. For example, a user in the United States who enters a search query “the Times” may be looking for information about or in the New York Times. In contrast, a user in Europe who enters the same query “the Times” may be looking for results about or in the London Times. Similarly, US and non-US users are usually looking for different result sets when they enter the query “football.” US users are looking for sites about American football and many non-US users are looking for sites about what US users would call “soccer.” As another example, when users in the UK enter the query “income tax” they are looking for sites about UK income tax, not US income tax.
In addition to looking for sites having information relevant to the user's country, some users are primarily interested in sites that are written in a language spoken by that user. For example, English language web sites are not usually helpful to a user who lives in a non-English speaking country and does not speak or read English.
Conventional search engines make some effort to tailor the result set they return to the geographical location or country location of the user. One technique conventionally used to determine a country associated with a web page is to determine the IP address of a server that is hosting the web page. If the server of a web page is located in a particular country, the web page is assumed to be associated with that country. This technique is not entirely effective because many web pages and sites are hosted across country borders. Moveover, aside from cross-border hosting, relying on IP addresses is neither definitive nor authorative. For example, a web page that is primarily of interest to people in the UK may be hosted in France and incorrectly identified as a French web page if only IP addresses are used to make a country determination. Similarly, reliance only on the name of a site is not always effective. For example, not all sites named fr.xxx.com are of interest to French users.
Registrar information, e.g., where the site was registered, suffers from the same problem as IP tables in that large sites are usually registered in the country of the parent country.
What is needed is an improved way determining which search results are of interest to the geographic location, country, or special interest group or a user entering a search query.